Trump voters are reporting that the touchscreen is switching votes to Hillary Clinton before their eyes.

Election judges in Clinton Township, Butler County confirmed there were issues with two of their eight automated voting machines. Most of the issues came when people tried to vote straight party ticket.

However, other said they specifically wanted to vote for Republican Donald Trump only to see their vote switched before their eyes to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Then this:

Officials have recalibrated the machines and are confident that the problem has been resolved.

What on earth does “recalibrated” mean? Maybe it’s like the times I have had to recalibrate my Wii video console. Are they saying the image on the screen did not correspond to where the machine detected the fingers?

But surely users would figure that out. Saying that voters saw their selection switched to Hillary Clinton sounds like something different.

Also, if we don’t see any stories about Hillary Clinton supporters complaining that their votes were switched to Trump, I think we must ask what is going on.

The best argument that this was all an innocent mistake is that the voters saw the problem. But what happens “internally” in the computer? How can any voter be confident that his vote was accurately recorded?

The U.S. government is mounting an unprecedented effort to defend the integrity of the 2016 presidential election Tuesday as hackers threaten to undermine the process at an unprecedented level.

“It’s all hands on deck,” a senior Obama administration official told NBC on Monday, revealing that for the first time hundreds of military and intelligence cyberexperts who work out of top-secret facilities will be monitoring the U.S. election.

Fear of cybersecurity threats has plagued the 2016 presidential election since June when the Democratic National Committee site was hacked, with the U.S. government later determining the culprits were associated with Russian intelligence. Since then, a steady trickle of leaked emails, large-scale attacks, and escalating (if vague) threats of cyberwarfare between the U.S. and Russia have cast a shadow over November 8, and beyond. WikiLeaks dumped morethan 8,000 new emails hacked from the DNC Sunday night, less than 48 hours before Election Day.

Now that the day is here, the most pressing question is whether hackers will try to sway the outcome of the election.

If our government is this worried about foreign threats, they should also acknowledge that a corrupt executive branch is also a concern.

Why not just dispense with the whole concern? Just dispense with digital voting machines and go back to only using paper! That way there is a physical and literal paper trail for investigating claims of voting irregularities.

The only other “solution” is to have the government “fix” the machines and assure us that they are secure.

Joe Scudder is the "nom de plume" (or "nom de guerre") of a fifty-ish-year-old writer and stroke survivor. He lives in St Louis with his wife and still-at-home children. He has been a freelance writer and occasional political activist since the early nineties. He describes his politics as Tolkienesque.